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KDE 4.6.0-beta1 packages available for OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana

The first beta of KDE 4.6.0 has rolled around, pretty much on schedule. In the KDE4-OpenSolaris community we’ve been following closely, building trunk as much as possible and upstreaming those patches that make sense. So we’re happy to announce that for the first time there are 0-day packages available for OpenSolaris-type systems using Sun Studio (I’ve got to add that last proviso because the Belenix guys do a good job of producing packages with gcc).

The packages can be had from the 4.6.0 package repository and include Plasma Desktop Workspace, KDE sdk, Konversation and Amarok along with a bunch of other things. There’s no KDE PIM, edu or KOffice because of various compilation problems that we have not yet been able to solve or functionality issues (e.g. KMail crashes in all of its GPG handling in a way that makes me suspect a compiler bug, but I haven’t been able to track it down well enough yet). The specfiles repository from which these packages are built is available too.

Supported Platforms: the packages are currently available for x86 only. In a poll we did some time ago there was little enthusiasm for specific 64-bit packages, so we have not been building them. Anyway, the Solaris kernel can mix-and-match 32- and 64-bit applications and libraries, so there’s not much lost. There’s no SPARC packages, in spite of some recent success in getting things to build. Here’s the list of supported platforms:

OpenSolaris build 134, x86 Edit: while the repo should build on 134, these packages will not install there because dependency names have changed.

Just those two, hunh. Later builds of either should work, but have not been tested. Oracle Solaris Express 2010.11 should work (it names itself build 151) but has not been tested. Solaris 10 is not supported, as it uses a different packaging system and needs lots of other updated software.

How to get it: set your kdeips-dev publisher to the new repository URL, refresh and install. Something like this should do:

PS. I’d like to welcome Onno Molenkamp to the fold. He’s been doing 64-bit builds for us and tackling some long-standing annoyances (in Virtuoso and Qt) that make the build less pleasant than it might. The #kde4-solaris channel now has random bits of Dutch on it, too.

PPS. KDE4-OpenSolaris acts as an "upstream" for OpenIndiana. We’re "downstream" from the work done by the KDE community, and massage the code a little and send it off again. There is plenty of scope for cooperation, and we’ve seen recent conversations about having various parties interested in stuff to work together more effectively. (Here "stuff" is Qt and KDE frameworks as well as KDE applications and Plasma workspaces).

PPPS. Solaris 10 isn’t dead as far as we are concerned, just very much unsupported and uninteresting as a target (even if it has a decent installed base of corporate use). Some people try building our specs every now and then and we do try to avoid actively breaking stuff for S10.

PPPPS. We know not all of our patches are acceptable for upstreaming. Some actively break stuff for other systems. Those are the kind that don’t go anywhere else. Sometimes we massage things until they are acceptable. It’s a bit of a trade-off. A shout-out to the author of Sentinella, Carlos Olmedo Escobar, for contacting me about the Solaris packaging we’ve tried to do and the patches that required. I hope to have Sentinella running on OpenSolaris pretty soon.

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on Thursday, November 25th, 2010 at 15:44 and is filed under KDE, OpenSolaris.
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